My wife spent 40 days in a psychiatric facility for postpartum psychosis after our twins were born. I'm still haunted by what happened.
My wife and I had twin boys — Lorenzo and Max — on April 2020.
Shortly after I watched my wife spiral into postpartum psychosis.
She ended going to an inpatient facility and she doesn't remember any of it.
Our twins, Lorenzo and Max, were born on April 3, 2020. A week later, my wife, Sondra, experienced a 36-hour psychotic episode. I watched helplessly as she spiraled from paranoia to hallucinations to an hours-long bout of screaming every fear and regret I knew she held deep in her heart out into the world.
The baby books I read didn't give much ink to postpartum psychosis other than "it is rare." Rare, according to the MGH Center for Women's Mental Health, means one or two women in 1000 experience postpartum psychosis after birth. Rare, and yet there she was the unlucky percent of a percent.
Sondra was sent home a few days later with medication to keep her stable and strict orders to sleep, which is practically impossible with twins, even if you have help. COVID meant the "village" we would have leaned on was a skeleton crew.
We had a few good weeks, but she wasn't sleeping. By the time the boys were six weeks old, Sondra's psychosis had reemerged, more subtle and secretive. I knew she was keeping something big from me.
She told me she had been thinking of killing herself
One morning in June, after an hour of pleading with her, she spoke her unimaginable truth: "I've been thinking about killing myself."
That summer, Sondra ended up spending almost 40 days in an inpatient psychiatric facility in Providence, and because of pandemic restrictions, I was not allowed to visit her. The only contact I had with her were brief phone calls, during which she never asked about our sons because she told me she didn't love them and that she didn't want to be a mom. I knew that wasn't true, that it was the psychosis talking, but she didn't even believe she was experiencing psychosis.
Meanwhile, I was at home, being the dad I always wanted to be. I was elbow deep in Similac and baby poop, but it was hard to sustain any real sense of joy. One minute I would be basking in all of the parts of fatherhood I'd waited for, then I'd think of Sondra, missing all of it, and feel something like survivor's guilt. Even the boundless love I felt for my boys was eclipsed by my fear for Sondra's well-being and the uncertainty hanging over our family's future.
She didn't have any memories of our babies
Hope faded as the summer wore on until, after weeks of no progress with medication, Sondra began electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Her doctor assured me that the procedure was nothing like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," which only brought to mind all of the terrifying and stigmatized depictions of "shock treatment" that I knew from movies and that one Ramones song. He also assured me that we were at the time for last resort, and while intense, ECT was effective in extreme cases such as Sondra's. I had no choice but to trust him.
After her third ECT session, she called me, and for the first time in months, I heard her actual voice, not her voice filtered through psychosis.
"Apparently, I have babies? Tell me all about them!"
A side effect of ECT is memory loss, for Sondra that meant everything from March of that year onward was gone. Four months of her life were redacted. Moments she had looked forward to her entire life erased. She doesn't remember being psychotic or suicidal, but she doesn't remember holding her sons for the first time, either. Sondra came home for good at the end of July. She was confused and run down, but she loved our sons again.
By the holidays, new memories finally started to stick. The memories she lost would never return, but we've talked extensively about what went on while she was away, and she knows that anytime she feels curious, I'm ready to recall what I can on demand.
I'm still haunted by what happened
It's been three years now, and despite all of the progress she's made and all evidence to the contrary, I remain haunted by the experience. I watched her lose her mind, I heard her say she wanted to end her life, and I got a brief, bitter taste of a world without her. Along with the memory of the time she missed, I carry the fear that her psychosis might return at any moment.
I recently asked her if she felt defined by her experience.
"No," she said. "How can I be defined by something I don't remember happening? Do you?"
"Of course," I told her. "It made me the dad I am. And I wake up a little afraid every day."
I think I always will.
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